The Filter: Oct. 17, 2008

POLLS CAUSE CAMPAIGNS TO CHANGE THEIR ITINERARIES(Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times)Confronting an increasingly bleak electoral map, top aides to Senator John McCain
said Thursday that they were searching for a “narrow-victory scenario”
and would focus in the final weeks on a dwindling number of states,
using mailings, telephone calls and television advertisements to try to
tear away support from Senator Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s advisers said they would use the remaining 19 days of
the campaign to focus mainly on capturing states that President Bush
won in 2004; he is going to Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia, over
the next three days and spending two days in Florida next week... By contrast, Mr. McCain is spending the next three days campaigning in
states that Mr. Bush won in 2004 and that earlier this year Republicans
had considered relatively safe: he will visit Florida on Friday,
followed by North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio. Republicans said their
hopes of capturing any state the Democrats won in 2004 appeared to be
dwindling... By every indication, Mr. Obama entered this post-debate period in a
significantly stronger position than Mr. McCain, with broader support
in polls, more options for an Electoral College victory and voters
increasingly fixated on the economic crisis, to the decided advantage
of Mr. Obama.

OBAMA AHEAD IN CRITICAL COUNTIES(Alexander Burns, Politico)Sen. Barack Obama holds leads in four key counties that will go a long
way toward determining the eventual winner in four important swing
states—Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—according to a new
Politico/Insider Advantage survey... In Bucks County,
a politically competitive but historically Republican suburb that
shares a border with Philadelphia, Obama is running ahead of McCain,
47-41 percent. In 2004, Democrat John Kerry carried the county by a
slim 51-48 percent. Obama bests McCain 50-42 percent in Prince William County,
a Washington, D.C. suburb that voted for George W. Bush in both 2000
and 2004. Between 1976 and 2004, Prince William County supported
Republican presidential candidates by an average margin of 18 points. Obama also has opened up a wide 53-37 percent advantage over McCain in suburban St. Louis County,
which does not include Missouri’s largest city, St. Louis. In 2004,
Democrat John Kerry carried St. Louis County, the most populous county
in the state, 54-45 percent. In Ohio’s Franklin County,
the state’s second-most populous county after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga
County, Obama leads by a narrower 45-40 percent margin. Kerry carried
Franklin County 54-45 percent in 2004.

AS MCCAIN'S ROAD GETS STEEPER, OBAMA WARNS OF OVERCONFIDENCE(Dan Balz and Shailagh Murray, Washington Post)The global financial crisis, coupled with Obama's steady performance
through the three presidential debates, has left McCain with an
extremely difficult path to the White House.
Absent his ability to pick off any state won by the Democrats four
years ago, he must prevent Obama from winning any of half a dozen
Republican states that now appear vulnerable. Republican strategists see trouble almost everywhere, facing the
prospect of not only losing the White House but seeing Democratic
majorities in the House and Senate grow as well. That could force a
competition for resources during the final weeks, but strategists said
a McCain comeback would be most helpful in relieving some of the
pressure on other GOP candidates... Obama sought to pump up his supporters with a stern message not to take
the race for granted. "For those of you who are feeling giddy or cocky
or think this is all set, I just have two words for you: New
Hampshire," he told top contributors... "I've been in these positions before when we were
favored and the press starts getting carried away and we end up getting
spanked."

THE END OF THE REAGAN ERA?(Ronald Brownstein, National Journal)Reagan's commanding victory 28 years ago marked what many historians
see as a hinge in American history -- a moment that was a transition
between political eras. If the Democrats win a victory of comparable
breadth on November 4, the obvious question will be whether 2008 marks
another transition... [But] even if Democrats win big next month, they will face the challenge
of understanding what kind of victory they have won. Large Democratic
gains unquestionably would reflect a severe judgment on George W.
Bush's performance as president. Although history may commend some of
Bush's twilight decisions (including the financial rescue package and
the "surge" in Iraq), his failures far outnumber his successes. And he
is approaching Election Day with the highest disapproval rating (71
percent) the Gallup Poll has recorded for any president. Less clear is whether a big Democratic win would represent an
ideological pivot like 1980. Many Democrats believe that a breakthrough
next month, coming after a financial meltdown that has discredited
unfettered markets, would represent the public's repudiation not just
of Bush's performance but of Reagan's small-government ideas... Conservatives are dubious.

TWO FAMILIES NAMED MCCAIN(Douglas A. Blackmon, Wall Street Journal)Lillie McCain is watching the presidential campaign from a singular perspective. A 56-year-old psychology professor whose family spans five
generations from the enslavement of her great-great-grandparents to her
own generation's fight for civil rights, Ms. McCain appreciates the
social changes that have opened the way for Sen. Barack Obama to be the
first major-party black contender for the White House. But she also has an uncommon view on another American passage. Ms.
McCain and her siblings are descended from two of about 120 slaves held
before the end of the Civil War at Teoc, the Mississippi plantation
owned by the family of Republican nominee John McCain's
great-great-grandfather. In a year when the historic nature of Sen. Obama's candidacy is
drawing much comment, the case of the Teoc McCains offers another
quintessential American narrative in black and white. For the black
McCain family, it is a story of triumph over the legacy of slavery; for
the white McCains, it is the evolution of a 19th-century cotton dynasty
into one rooted in an ethic of military and national service.

MCCAIN MAP STRATEGY PROMPTS QUESTIONS(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)According to most polls, Barack Obama holds a double-digit lead in
Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, all states
that many political strategists and pollsters believe are too far gone
at this late date for John McCain to win. Still, McCain’s campaign soldiers on in those Democratic-leaning
states, committing its most precious commodities — time and money —
even as the Republican nominee struggles to lock up the red states he
likely must sweep to win the presidency. It’s a head-scratching strategy that is leading even some Republicans
to wonder why the McCain campaign hasn’t written off places such as
Iowa and Pennsylvania and strategically retreated to ensure victory in
more favorable red state terrain — such as Virginia and North Carolina
— that it absolutely cannot afford to lose.

SEARCHING FOR OBAMA'S 95 PERCENT(Phillip Klein, American Spectator)"We are going to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans," Barack Obama's
campaign manager, David Plouffe, said in the spin room here at Hofstra
University following the final debate of the 2008 presidential election. Plouffe was repeating one of the boldest claims made by the Obama campaign. It's a claim that the Wall Street Journal editorial board dubbed
"Obama's 95% Illusion," noting that more than a third of Americans
don't pay any income taxes, and that what Obama's plan does do is offer
a raft of subsidies and government payments to individuals and families
that he redefines as "tax cuts." His proposal looks more like a
redistribution scheme than an honest effort to reduce taxes -- as he revealed on Monday when he told a now famous Ohio plumber that his plan aimed to "spread the wealth around."

OBAMA NAILS THE DEBATE TRIFECTA(John Heilemann, New York)McCain was even worse than Gore in one crucial respect: He gave off a
vibe of profound and all-encompassing solipsism. In his complaints last
night about Obama’s negative ads — complaints that have some validity,
in that the Democrat’s campaign has in fact been more negative than
many people believe, though nothing as incendiary as McCain’s — he came
across as aggrieved, self-pitying, whiny, entitled. The unspoken
sentiment behind his words and bearing was, “This fatuous,
line-jumping, all-talk-no-action punk is about to take the job that was
supposed to be mine! Can you believe this s**t?!” The issues he
incessantly chose to harp on — earmarks, ethanol, Colombian free trade
— are, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic and pet-peevish. In other words,
it’s all about him. The contrast with Obama, who throughout all three
debates labored mightily to turn every disquisition back to the
concerns of you, the voter, was nearly as unflattering as the one
between Obama’s million-dollar smile and McCain’s dime-store grimace.

SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF(Matthew Yglesias, Think Progress)To me, the crux of the matter is that McCain can’t get out of the
habits that served him very well when he was a Senator building a
glowing national reputation largely by talking directly to elite
members of the political press... A lot of McCain’s best moments will have gone way over the heads of
most people... [For example,] he’s had a knack for besting Obama on national security issues
nobody cares about, like the relationship of US-Colombia trade deals to
the US-Venezuela proxy conflict playing out in the Colombian jungle. [But] people figure that Obama seems like a smart guy, and if something
important happens involving a guerilla group nobody’s heard of fighting
a president nobody’s heard of in a country nobody cares about, that
Obama’s up to the task of coming up with a good idea — meanwhile,
McCain has no education policy. What Obama’s good at doing is redirecting conversations to things
people care about. He’s good at conveying both with words and body
language that when the subject shifts to something people don’t care
about, that he’d rather be addressing the things people care about... It’s not about how he feels or what he wants... By contrast, McCain’s key campaign theme is that McCain is awesomeand that the government should spend less money, neither of which have
anything to do with real problems in real people’s lives.

WHO'S PLAYING THE RACE CARD?(Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post)The search for McCain's racial offenses is untiring and often unhinged. Remember McCain's Berlin/celebrity ad
that showed a shot of Paris Hilton? An appalling attempt to exploit
white hostility at the idea of black men "becoming sexually involved
with white women," fulminated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.
He took to TV to denounce McCain's exhumation of that most vile
prejudice, pointing out McCain's gratuitous insertion in the ad of "two phallic symbols," the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa... What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he
has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond
what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama's
deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Rev. Wright. In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use
of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to
be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism.

FBI INVESTIGATES ACORN FOR VOTER [REGISTRATION] FRAUD(Lara Jakes Jordan, ABC News)The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN
helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the
presidential election. A senior law enforcement official confirmed the
investigation to The Associated Press on Thursday. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at
results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any
evidence of a coordinated national scam... Some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter
registration forms — including some signed `Mickey Mouse' or other
fictitious characters. Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud
investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five other
states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also recently
questioned the group's voter forms. ACORN has said the "vast majority" of its workers are conscientious,
but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake
information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false
information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

OBAMA BETS ON BIG FLORIDA TURNOUT(Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times) Barack Obama has sent five of his most senior operatives to Florida --
two of them to focus on the single county that includes Miami -- for
the duration of the presidential campaign, in a newly sharpened
strategy to win the election by driving Democratic voter turnout in the
Republican-dominated state. The big bet on Florida and Miami-Dade County, Obama aides say, is
based on the campaign's belief that it has secured enough supporters to
win the state and must now ensure that those supporters get to the
polls -- in contrast to states such as Ohio, where the campaign
believes victory depends on persuading more voters to support Obama. On Thursday, Miami-Dade County disclosed that Democrats had added more
than 94,000 new voters to the rolls since January, compared with about
21,000 new Republicans... The party has also
made large gains statewide, though final numbers are not yet known. Now the Obama campaign believes that it can win Florida -- and,
therefore, a majority in the Electoral College -- by turning these
voter registration gains into actual votes. In addition, the campaign
has identified more than half a million African Americans and hundreds
of thousands of young people statewide who were already registered but
did not vote four years ago.

RISE IN VOTING BY MAIL TRANSFORMS RACE IN COLORADO(Kirk Johnson, New York Times)With Election Day less than three weeks away, the number of people voting by mail has exploded in Colorado,
a closely divided state up for grabs in November. Nearly half of the
state’s registered voters have requested ballots by mail, compelling
the Obama and McCain campaigns to kick-start their get-out-the-vote
efforts — and devise new and imaginative ones. All across the
state, the traditional Election Day sprint by campaign workers has
changed into a nearly monthlong marathon, made all the more pressing by
the tightness of the race. Two recent statewide polls suggest a
dead heat in Colorado. Both the latest CNN/Time poll and one conducted
by Suffolk University in Boston give Mr. Obama a four-point advantage,
an edge that falls within each poll’s margin of sampling error.

MCCAIN FORCED TO FIGHT FOR VIRGINIA(Michael D. Shear and Amy Gardner, Washington Post)Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain
will take different messages to different audiences in different parts
of Virginia over the next two days, but they will have the same goal in
mind: to urge their supporters to spend the final stretch of the
campaign fighting for every vote they can find... In his quest to win the Old Dominion, Obama is trying to end 44 years of Republican dominance and become the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson
to carry the state. McCain's challenge is more immediate, as he has
less than three weeks to reverse polls that show a trend against him. By every organizational measure, Obama's campaign appears to have
the advantage -- it has nearly three times as many offices, has
contacted tens of thousands more potential supporters, and has helped
register nearly half a million new voters this year, most of whom state
officials believe favor the Democrat. But Virginia remains a state with strong conservative tendencies,
and it is unclear whether a majority will pull the lever for a Democrat
whom McCain has derided as having "the most liberal voting record in
the United States Senate."
A key to a McCain comeback will be whether Republicans have built a
strong enough get-out-the-vote operation in a state where none has ever
been needed, something many party leaders question.